Welcome to Our Blog Conversations Beyond the Classroom!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study? As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…). Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

21st century mind

In this section Cookson is discussing the 4 elements of a 21st century mind; Critical Reflection, Empirical Reasoning, Collective Intelligence, and Metacognition. Cookson says, "The 21st century mind will need to be successfully manage the complexity and the diversity of our world by becoming more fluid, more flexible, more focused on reality, and radically more innovative" (p9)
What he means by this is that, our minds in the 21st century need to be able to handle all of the information we are receiving and in order to do that and function like someone from the 21st century we need to adapt to the changes. In order to adapt to the changes we need to change how it is we learn and throw out the old ways that hinder us.
We must Critically reflect on what it is we are seeing/ hearing to decide if it is real or not. Cookson brought "Manifest Destiny" into his essay. That should really be enough said about.
We must break away from the supernatural and use Empirical Reasoning. We need to keep our theories for everything rooted in fact and logic and not blame everything on a supernatural presence or spend 100% of our effort praying for the situation to be fixed.
We must use Collective intelligence to get the job done. Cookson said, "None of us are educational islands unto ourselves." (p16). What he means is that, while we may be able to learn a little by ourselves we can't and never will be able to learn everything we know alone. People have pooled information over the course of human history, we should probably continue doing that.
Lastly we must use Metacognition which kind of sounds like a super power. Which in a way I suppose it is because without it we wouldn't be able to problem solve... so we never would have found a use for fire... never would have made the wheel... never would have done anything. Yup, Metacognition is the super power of higher brain function allowing us to turn a problem over in our mind to look at it and decide the best approach for it.
And that is a 21st century mind. It's nothing alien or robotic it is still very human. Just taking out a good portion of the stupid decisions that caused some serious shenanigans to happen through out history.
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